Sunday, April 5, 2015

F-35 Lightning II pilot's helmet costs $400,000 per helmet

The U.S. Air Force’s F-35 Lightning II comes with a $400,000 helmet that allows pilots to “see” through the aircraft.

Lockheed
Martin’s single-engine fighter aircraft is outfitted with six cameras
and 8 million lines of code, which gives a pilot wearing the helmet 360
degrees of vision. Anywhere the pilot looks, vision is not hindered.

“When
the helmet’s tuned correctly to the pilot’s eyes, you almost step
into this other world where all this information comes in. You can look
through the jet’s eyeballs to see the world as the jet sees the
world,” Al Norman, an F-35 test pilot for Lockheed Martin, told The Washington Post on Wednesday.

The
helmet has gone through multiple iterations, with previous versions
causing pilots to have motion sickness. The current version has trouble
sharing communications between pilots when they fly in formation, but Mr. Norman is confident that technical problems will be resolved soon.